Golf is a real-world activity that can be used for comparison here. It's a good candidate because there is a standard handicap rating system issued by a central governing body, and there are a large number of amateur players who play regularly, compared to other sports.
- Roughly 10% of golfers in the US maintain a handicap rating.
- "Today, the 2,417,905 who have a handicap included 2,051,675 “active posters,” meaning they posted at least one score in 2020. However, the average number of posted scores was 38, almost double the average number of rounds played by golfers overall last year—so it’s pretty clear that those who get a handicap are among the game’s most engaged participants." [0]
- "it has been found that on a given day the average golfer would be expected to post a score of approximately 100 strokes when following all the rules of golf" [1] which is 28 strokes over par. A 28 handicap is around the 5%-ile of golfers with a handicap [2]
- As such, those 10% of golfers with a handicap should overlap pretty heavily with the top 10-20% of all golfers. The 50%-ile of golfers with a handicap is 13 [2], so by extrapolation that should be 90-95%-ile of all golfers.
- 13 is still a solid handicap. That's someone who is breaking 90 (better than bogey golf) pretty much every round and likely has years of practice. Saying it "isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do" would be an incorrect statement in my opinion.
- (as a sanity check, the 90%-ile of golfers with a handicap is a handicap of 5. Most D1 golfers will have a handicap right around 0, and D3 will be maybe 2. Given the number of casual golfers, it seems likely that only about 1 or 2 out of 100 are nearing that level.)
It also shows that the population you're comparing yourself to, i.e. the denominator, matters a lot. If you're comparing yourself mostly to people who do some activity pretty regularly, top 5-10% means you're pretty good compared to the average person on the street who may never have touched a golf club. But if you draw your population from anyone who has ever taken a swing at a golf ball, 5-10% is a lot less impressive.
There is a difference, between going online conscious, when you turn on the computer - or a stressful always being half online with the phone in hand or pocket.
I have a smartphone, but I regulary have it off for longer periods. That helps.
In this case, the ad network would presumably not know or else they wouldn't keep showing you ads.
But it's worth noting that ad networks are more interconnected than most people realize. You can go to Facebook and see the "off-Facebook activity" they have received about you from partners, many of which are retailers. I imagine purchase-history is part of what's shared if you make purchases with those retailers using a email/phone number that's also associated with your Facebook account.
Note that 20 other states already have permitless legal carry. Vermont is one of the longest-running states to allow it.
Texas is actually not one of the more permissive states when it comes to firearm laws. Everyone just thinks it is because of the "don't mess with texas," "wild west" image they like to maintain.
I remember seeing your comment on that previous post. I enjoy seeing those sorts of "behind the curtain" details that break down stack & cost of applicaitons.
I'm curious if you've tested what it would cost to just host on EC2 (or something potentially even cheaper in AWS like ECS Fargate) with a savings plan. At a glance, it looks like AWS would be cheaper than DO if you can commit to 1-yr reserved instances.
That would seem like an easier (and possibly more effective) way to get around costly AWS outbound data costs compared to running a separate cache and sending data across the internet between cloud providers just to save $200/mo.
Back in the day I did use EC2, but to get the same performance (especially SSD IOPs) it cost a lot more than DigitalOcean. Back then, the monthly bill for EC2 was over $3,000/mo. Switching to DigitalOcean we got better performance for under $1k/mo.
That's basically an anarchist point of view. If you can't outlaw anything no matter the harm it causes, then what's left for the role of government? "At least it's an ethos" and all, but that's not how any modern society operates.
No, it's not; maybe I didn't express it well. The government absolutely has a role in preventing harm and punishing those who cause it - if you pollute the atmosphere, the government can come after you. If you hurt someone, the government can come after you. But if you just own and use bitcoin, the government can't come after you just because some bad guy also uses bitcoin.
Biggest question in my mind is why state bureaucrats are given the latitude to think it's a good idea to build their own one-off solutions. There are 50+ markets for these sorts of systems. It makes absolutely zero sense for them each to build & maintain their own software products. Of course big consulting firms are going to _leap_ at the opportunity to bill $50M per state and then throw together products as cheaply as possible.
States need to start working together on these platforms with in-house technical teams that can actually own the systems long-term. Or we need to make it far easier for them to purchase SaaS products like any sane private market.
NASWA is good at facilitating knowledge-sharing, but they are no better equipped to build a software product than any state IT department. Each state is still ultimately handling "modernization" in their own way. There's very little appetite for COTS for whatever reason, and little sharing of technical components between states.
If a motivated small company wanted to work with NASWA in a "not business as usual" approach, perhaps with 18F involved, I believe it could be done. Part of their role is to reduce duplicative efforts across states and try to establish best practices.
The problem of course is how many small companies are knowledgeable about the UI IT systems, and can put together a strong proposal? It's a bit chicken and egg. Yes, NASWA could push this harder if they really wanted to, but it's hard to manage a consensus oriented organization.
(I was not implying NASWA was going to build things themselves...though if I were king, I would have them develop an open source UI platform, and then give it to the states to customize for their individual scenarios. Companies could compete on how well they make those customizations, and support contracts. Of course the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction, unfortunately... c.f. VistA -> Cerner).
I have an insider's perspective on one of the systems mentioned in the article, and from what I could see, politics played no part until everything went off the rails and they started flinging shit in the media.
Things start out with a few in-house sysadmins hacking together some scripts to start batch loading records into a database or whatever. At some point they get far enough along to decide to bring in an external consulting firm to build out a more fully-featured solution.
At that point, it becomes a very ironic situation. The meat of the requirements are laid out by career bureaucrats who work in state government agencies (unemployment, in this case). They are extremely risk-averse because their jobs are typically very secure and, barring any criminal activity, the only thing that can sink a career is some sort of publicized failure involving taxpayer dollars.
So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large, established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty. Furthermore, they want to go from 0-100 right away and convert an old manual paper process to a fully-featured SaaS-style product in one go with a bunch of different feature requests coming from different people.
Thus they ironically end up with a massive risk of failure precisely because of the steps they took to mitigate risk in their minds. They have no prior experience developing software and are usually lacking in overall technical expertise. Really they have no business designing any sort of software solution or negotiating a contract to build one. It's doomed to fail simply based on the premise.
The best outcome would be for a dedicated SaaS company to build something that could be purchased by multiple states. I actually briefly explored starting something like this but couldn't make the numbers work. These departments have very little discretionary budget. Selling to each state would require a literal act of congress, and your TAM is only 53 distinct customers. And because of the inability to quickly make a purchase, they all seem to start out with that in-house hacked approach which naturally leads to paying for consultants to "improve" it, not starting over with a product purchase.
> So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large, established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty
To be fair to the bureaucrats involved in a specific project, this approach, including specific staging of particular waterfall-style deliverables (with more complex checkpointing and midproject external reporting and oversight required the larger the project and sometimes on other bases, such as particular outside-of-the-agency, e.g. federal, funding streams) is often mandated by statewide contracting rules (a mixture of general and IT-specific mandates), not something that the bureaucrats directly involved in a particular project impose.
And while in many cases ill-advised and counterproductive, each of those rules is typically reactively developed in response to and as a means of mitigating repetition of specific instances of negligent, incompetent, or outright corrupt contract administration that occurred in the past.
- Roughly 10% of golfers in the US maintain a handicap rating.
- "Today, the 2,417,905 who have a handicap included 2,051,675 “active posters,” meaning they posted at least one score in 2020. However, the average number of posted scores was 38, almost double the average number of rounds played by golfers overall last year—so it’s pretty clear that those who get a handicap are among the game’s most engaged participants." [0]
- "it has been found that on a given day the average golfer would be expected to post a score of approximately 100 strokes when following all the rules of golf" [1] which is 28 strokes over par. A 28 handicap is around the 5%-ile of golfers with a handicap [2]
- As such, those 10% of golfers with a handicap should overlap pretty heavily with the top 10-20% of all golfers. The 50%-ile of golfers with a handicap is 13 [2], so by extrapolation that should be 90-95%-ile of all golfers.
- 13 is still a solid handicap. That's someone who is breaking 90 (better than bogey golf) pretty much every round and likely has years of practice. Saying it "isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do" would be an incorrect statement in my opinion.
- (as a sanity check, the 90%-ile of golfers with a handicap is a handicap of 5. Most D1 golfers will have a handicap right around 0, and D3 will be maybe 2. Given the number of casual golfers, it seems likely that only about 1 or 2 out of 100 are nearing that level.)
[0] https://www.linksmagazine.com/how-do-you-match-up-against-th...
[1] https://golftips.golfweek.usatoday.com/average-golf-handicap...
[2] https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/handicapping/han...